Yeah, it's hard for me to envision what the next iteration on Reddit could be. Maybe there isn't one and instead we're seeing a resurgence of forum silos again that's winning back the mainstream.
For example, I was pleasantly surprised to see Discourse have so much success and high profile roll outs (like Boing Boing and Blizzard). It turns out that everyone was ready for a modern revitalization of the forum experience, not that forums were doomed.
I think I'd liken it to the explosion of Slack/Discord popularity. It would have been a mistake to look at the slow death of IRC and conclude "I guess people don't like chatting anymore."
"Discourse" and "Discord" are two different products. One a slack like chat app for gaming, the other is a forum software produced by that guy from stack overflow
discord and twitter, everything is just a messy ocean of piss imo, discord is not an iteration on reddit, maybe some people prefer discord to reddit but it is far from a replacement. It's a big JS-heavy chatroom (almost like new reddit...).
For example, I was pleasantly surprised to see Discourse have so much success and high profile roll outs (like Boing Boing and Blizzard). It turns out that everyone was ready for a modern revitalization of the forum experience, not that forums were doomed.
I think I'd liken it to the explosion of Slack/Discord popularity. It would have been a mistake to look at the slow death of IRC and conclude "I guess people don't like chatting anymore."